The Hollow Tree

by James Brogden

  * * *

  When she woke up, Tom was there again.

  ‘Hey,’ she murmured.

  ‘Hey.’ He put away his phone and bent close, stroking the hair out of her eyes.

  ‘How long have you been there?’

  ‘I dunno. An hour?’

  ‘You should have woken me.’

  ‘No bloody way,’ he said. ‘The nurses in this place are terrifying. One of them said if I disturbed you she’d use me for spare parts.’

  ‘Sounds about right. Could you—?’

  He helped her sit up and got her some water. ‘You know if I could have given my hand I would’ve,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘Honestly, though, I was just reading about it. They’re getting really good at hand transplants. There’s this pub landlord who had gout and—’

  She reached up and stroked his cheek, shutting him up. It was bristly, which surprised her. One of the things that had attracted her to him in the first place had been how scrupulous he was about grooming. Her best friend Sandra had opined that it was vain, if not actually gay, for a man to moisturise and wouldn’t she prefer a bit of stubble instead, to which she’d replied God no, who needed all that scratching about in your neck? ‘Neck?’ Sandra had retorted in horror. ‘Girl, if he’s going no further south than your neck you definitely don’t want anything to do with him!’ But here he was – unshaven, and it worried her.

  ‘Are you looking after yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘Me? What about you? You’re the one who’s hurt.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re the one who’s going to have to look after me – at least to begin with. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘Then please do me a favour: don’t do the whole “I’d cut my arm off for you” thing. I know what you mean and I love you for it but it doesn’t help. Or stories about arm transplants. It’s hard enough trying to get my head around the fact that it’s gone in the first place. I need you solid and down to earth, to help me cope.’

  Tom nodded. ‘Okay.’

  ‘They say that if there’s no swelling or infection and I’m strong enough they’ll move me to an ordinary ward tomorrow or the day after.’

  ‘That’ll be good, won’t it?’

  Rachel fiddled with the dressing. ‘I don’t want visitors.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’m serious, Tom. I don’t think I could handle your whole family, everyone, being all sorry and full of sympathy. I just want to deal with this. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Absolutely. No visitors.’

  ‘Or flowers. Or balloons. Or any of those horrible cuddly toys.’

  ‘No hospital gift shop tat. Got it.’

  ‘Chocolate’s okay.’

  ‘Well obviously.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I brought you a bag. I didn’t know how long they’d keep you in, so it’s just some spare clothes and stuff.’ He placed a sports holdall beside her, being careful of all her various tubes and wires. She looked inside.

  ‘Along with, it looks like, everything from the bathroom cabinet and off my bedside table.’

  He shrugged. ‘How am I supposed to know what’s important?’

  It might have been the drugs, but she didn’t think she had ever loved him as much as she did right at that very moment.

  * * *

  The next day they removed the tubes from her arms and Rachel began to feel a bit more like herself and less of a battlefield between injury and surgery. They told her she was making excellent progress and arranged visits from a prosthetics specialist, an occupational therapist, someone from the West Midlands Rehabilitation Centre at Selly Oak and even a social worker. ‘I’m an amputee, for God’s sake, not an addict,’ she complained to her mother. All of them had appointments they wanted to make with her and forms for her to fill in. ‘My job has less paperwork than this. Sod’s law it would be my writing hand that’s perfectly fine.’

  ‘You shouldn’t make jokes about this,’ Olivia tutted.

  ‘I have to joke. It’s just too tragic otherwise.’

  * * *

  They kept her on the surgical ward for three days and then moved her to a recovery ward, where any temptation she might have had to feel sorry for herself withered in the company of a middle-aged man occupying the cubicle across from her, who spent long periods of time just staring at the fat white stumps where his legs had been as if waiting for them to suddenly hatch like cocoons.

  4

  HOME

  TOM PICKED HER UP IN THE VAN HE DROVE FOR HIS family’s landscaping and gardening business. She’d made such good progress during her week on the recovery ward that they were letting her go straight home, albeit with a small pharmacy’s worth of medication and a strict timetable of outpatient checkups to obey.

  ‘There’s somewhere I need to go first,’ she told him, as she eased herself into the van. Her arm had been put in a hard cast to protect it while the stitches healed, and strapped up tightly to her body to prevent her from accidentally bashing it, but it was still the first time she’d had to manoeuvre with it outside the safety of the hospital and she felt like she needed a buffer zone of at least a metre around it at all times. The cab of the van felt horribly cramped, but it was still more spacious than Tom’s car.

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  She showed him the address on her phone.

  ‘Really?’ He shrugged. ‘Okay, if you say so.’

  He drove them out of the city, through the suburbs and grim-faced estates, and into the industrial edge-lands where the skin of the city gave up even pretending to be green and became the concrete that it had always been.

  ARJ Clinical Waste Management inhabited the same kind of small factory unit as any of the other dozens of interchangeable mechanical or engineering firms in the area: a square-framed prefabricated building with half a dozen forklifts and vans parked in the yard, all surrounded by a chain-link fence. The only notable difference here was the large number of bright yellow dumpsters, wheelie bins, containers and notices reading CLINICAL WASTE: FOR INCINERATION ONLY.

  Tom parked up across the road and turned to her. ‘I still don’t understand why you need to come here,’ he said.

  Rachel carefully disengaged her left arm from the seat belt. ‘You know you told me about that time when you were six and your great-granddad took you and Spence and Gramps to Normandy, to see where he fought?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t remember anything about it.’

  ‘And you know why people leave flowers at the sites of fatal car accidents?’

  ‘Okay, I get it. Memorials.’

  ‘Kind of. People need to see the places where their loved ones died.’

  ‘But you’re not dead,’ Tom pointed out.

  She held up her arm. ‘This part of me is.’

  He winced. ‘Fair enough. But I’m coming with you.’

  ‘I don’t need you to—’

  ‘Too late, already happening,’ he said, opening the door and getting out.

  There was a gate with a small booth, and a stubble-headed man with a hi-vis vest and a clipboard sitting in it. ‘Help you?’ he grunted.

  Rachel turned on her best smile – granted, she was in a hoodie and sweatpants, didn’t have a bit of make-up on and altogether probably looked like she’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, but it was the best she could do. ‘Hello. Can you please tell me if your company handles waste from Heartlands Hospital?’

  His small eyes narrowed with suspicion, if not actual thought. ‘You got some ID?’

  She could feel Tom bristling beside her and sighed. She hadn’t wanted this to turn into a pissing contest.

  ‘Why does she need ID?’ Tom demanded. ‘She’s just asking a question.’

  Rachel turned aside a little and murmured, ‘She’s right here, darling.’ Then, stepping a little closer to the man in the booth, she showed him her truncated arm and smiled sweetly. ‘I think you might have incinerated something
of mine. Can I please see a supervisor or something?’

  There was that wince again, this time from both of them. The booth guard muttered something that might have been ‘I’ll go get him’, and scurried off without looking at her again. Whatever his job description was, it plainly didn’t cover dealing with bolshie one-armed women. He returned with a version of himself who was younger, slimmer, and had slightly more hair.

  ‘Good afternoon.’ The newcomer smiled. His eyes flicked down to her arm but the smile didn’t waver. ‘Can I help? I’m told you have a complaint about something?’

  ‘I’m sorry, there’s been a misunderstanding,’ Rachel said. ‘There’s no complaint, honestly. I simply wanted to know whether you handled the waste from the hospital that performed my operation. That’s all, nothing else. No complaints.’

  ‘Heartlands?’ he asked. ‘Yes, yes we do. Consignments are processed and disposed of within twenty-four hours.’

  Waste, she thought. He doesn’t want to refer to my hand as waste to my face – and I wouldn’t either if I were him.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you see,’ he continued. ‘Health and safety, you understand.’

  ‘I understand. Thank you for your time. Come on, darling.’ She led Tom back to the van.

  ‘So,’ he said, as they got in. ‘That was fun. Are you done?’

  She looked at the place, fixing it in her memory. There were no twinges from her absent hand. Everything below the wrist was quiet and dead. ‘Yes. I’m done. It’s gone now. Let’s go home.’

  * * *

  Rachel explored her home for what felt like the first time, with eyes looking for the obstacles to a one-handed existence that they obviously hadn’t anticipated when they’d bought the place. Tom’s parents had paid the deposit on a detached family home in Shenley Fields, an area of town that had been smart and fashionable after the war, when building standards were more generous, and even though it had gone a bit to seed in later years it was still technically a part of Bournville Village Trust, which meant there was a decent amount of green space that was looked after and not so much of the cramped over-building that blighted a lot of the city. There was a large playing field surrounding a small lake raucous with Canada geese, care homes in quiet cul-de-sacs, the ruins of Weoley Castle just up the road in one direction and a large leisure centre in the other. The house itself had been rented out by the previous owners after the death of an elderly relative, and by the time it had come to Rachel and Tom it had needed a lot of renovation. He’d jumped at the chance to flex his DIY muscles, and she wasn’t averse to living with a certain amount of chaos while walls were replastered and rotten woodwork replaced, but it wasn’t anywhere close to being finished yet.

  Rachel had claimed the garden as her own personal project, even though she’d had neither the time nor the inclination to do anything beyond move an outdoor table and some chairs onto the leaf-littered patio. Tom was more than happy with this, because the last thing he wanted to do was come home from working on somebody else’s land and have to go straight out into digging his own.

  The money from his parents hadn’t been entirely without strings, even though they remained invisible and, for the most part, un-pulled. Charlotte hadn’t exactly been subtle in her evaluation of how many children’s bedrooms the property might allow. Tom had been suitably embarrassed by his mother’s broodiness-by-proxy, but Rachel knew that he was watching his sister Rosie’s growing family with interest and wasn’t going to be content as just Uncle Tom for too many years. The room that had been worked on least was the rear upstairs bedroom; what Rachel called the ‘spare room’ but which she’d seen in his scribbled designs referred to as ‘nursery’. Fortunately there was enough work needing to be done on the rest of the place before they began to have those arguments. She didn’t know what kind of impact her injury was going to have. Life-changing injuries was what they called it on the news. Let’s just see if you can handle a tin opener first, shall we? she told herself.

  Inside the front porch she looked at the racks of shoes, with all their laces. Velcro was going to be her new friend, she decided, along with buckles, straps and pop-studs. ‘Well the good news,’ she said, ‘is that I get to buy a whole load of new footwear.’

  Tom was wrestling her bag out of the van. ‘And the bad news?’ he called.

  She looked at him. ‘There is no downside to this. Fancy a cup of tea?’

  ‘Give me a chance, I’m not through the door yet.’

  ‘It’s all right, I’ll do it.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s such a good idea?’

  ‘It’s a cup of tea, not juggling fire.’ She scooped up the small drift of junk mail, pizza menus, and unpromising brown envelopes that had accumulated behind the front door, collecting them right-handed against her left instep. ‘I have to start living with this,’ she said.

  It was good to be back in her own kitchen, surrounded by her own things, all exactly where she knew they should be – even the boiler, another of Tom’s works-in-progress, which looked like someone was midway performing open-heart surgery on a robot. Looking through the cutlery drawer she chanced upon a potato peeler, and felt an odd pang at the idea that she might never use such a simple thing again. She found that the only difference having one hand made (at least in the case of tea-making) was that everything was just a bit slower and required a more methodical approach. The trickiest bit was spinning the lid off the milk bottle.

  Tea made, she picked up Tom’s mug to take it through to him, glanced at the surface of the brown liquid and stopped.

  She couldn’t breathe. At precisely the same time her heart began to race, and sweat broke out on her brow as if she had a fever, despite feeling freezing cold. Her left hand, the one that wasn’t there, was frozen too – she could actually feel goosebumps rising on her dead wrist.

  She wasn’t looking into a cup of tea at all. She was staring at her own reflection in the dead black water of the canal between the two boats that held her trapped, still.

  Then the face changed and a voice from the blackness whispered:

  ‘Not dead.’

  Rachel screamed and dropped the mug, which shattered into a hundred thick shards on the kitchen tiles, spraying a flood of stinking black canal water.

  Then Tom was there, his hands either side of her face, and it was just a spilt mug of tea, just a mess that needed cleaning up, and no whispering voice.

  * * *

  That night, as they undressed, she was aware of him looking at her sidelong – or rather, at her arm.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied, and turned away, tossing his shirt in the laundry hamper.

  ‘Bollocks nothing. Does this make you feel uncomfortable?’

  ‘Me uncomfortable? No, I just thought… I don’t want to… sharing a bed… what if I accidentally… I could make up the spare bed until you’ve gotten used to…’

  ‘You’re not going to squash my arm in the night,’ she told him. ‘And neither of us is sleeping in the spare room.’

  And neither of them did. They just held each other for a long time, but afterwards she thought that he slept ever so slightly further away from her than was usual.

  5

  REHABILITATION

  A WEEK LATER SHE HAD HER FIRST FOLLOW-UP examination in Adenson’s office. He removed the dressings and examined her wound (she had quickly grown to hate the word ‘stump’; it had an ugly, final sound to it), and pronounced her as having made excellent progress.

  ‘The stitches will come out on their own, in time,’ he said. ‘You’re keeping up with your physio?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Rachel replied. ‘I do not want to be in Yomi’s bad books.’ She’d even taken herself out for a few runs – just around the playing field next to the house and back, but it was a start.

  ‘How are the phantom sensations?’

  ‘I hear they’re gigging the cruise ship circuit these days.’

  He blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’


  ‘Sorry. Um, no. Nothing significant. No actual pain, anyway. Flashes of hot and cold, some terrible pins and needles.’

  ‘They will subside over time. It’s a—’

  ‘Long process, I know.’

  Nothing as bad as the incident with the tea had happened since, and she’d put that down to a simple anxiety attack – she certainly hadn’t told anybody about the voice from the mug, convincing herself that it was just part of the post-traumatic stress that she’d been told to expect. Though there had been one odd moment a few nights afterwards. She must have fallen asleep on her arm, as everyone did once in a while, because the pins and needles had spread from her wound right up into her armpit, and she half-woke to find her arm lying across her chest like a large, warm, numb slug. Still half-asleep, she’d started to knead blood and life back into the other limb, and just for a moment she could have sworn that her living right hand had curled around the non-existent fingers of her dead hand, and that they’d squeezed each other like old friends hugging after a long absence. She could well understand the phenomenon of phantom sensations in her dead hand, but in her living one? In the sanity of daylight she’d convinced herself that it had been her half-dreaming mind playing tricks.

  ‘Here,’ said Adenson, handing her something which looked like a packet of department-store underpants. ‘These are compression socks. Just a cotton-Lycra sleeve which fits over your stump – they’ll help to prevent dirt getting into the stitches, as well as generally with the hypersensitivity and the swelling.’

  Rachel fumbled the pack open and examined one. It looked like an ordinary sports support. It was heavily elasticated and she struggled to get it over the end of her stump, but when Adenson offered to help she swatted him away. When she finally managed to roll the material down over her wrist it made the buzzing from her nerve endings diminish immediately. ‘Nice,’ she said, relishing the relief. ‘Hey, do you think they come in other colours?’